Hi list,
some days ago I spent my time at the Nagios conference at Nuremberg, Germany. I like that! Great event. Since I implemented a large Nagios installation (with almost 200 hosts and more than 5500 services) last year and nowadays I am maintaining it (it is still dynamically growing), I am really interested in nice Nagios based solutions. Unfortunately with regard to large Nagios environments I am missing some stuff.
Especially a nice web frontend with fine-grained authorization and authentication methods would be nice. In the last year and at the conference I saw a lot of script language based solutions. Besides that I heard through the grapevine, that the planned PHP based web interface for Nagios 3 is delayed and will be implemented (maybe) in Nagios 4.
Here is where the subject Nicaragua comes into play. Some days ago I launched a project at Sourceforge called Nicaragua which aims at developing such a webinterface under the GPL. Maybe you want to ask: Why yet another web interface? The short answer is: Because we are convinced that scripted solutions are limited.
To cut a long story short. What are we going to do and what components will we use? What is the overall intention of this project? What is the status of the project right now?
Based on the NDO, our first step will be, just to implement the native Nagios web interface, as you all know it. We will use Java 1.5, Servlet / JSP specification 2.4 / 2.0, running in Tomcat using Spring and Hibernate. Our intention will be to develop one of / or even the standard Nagios webinterface.
Right now, we are in planning phase, examining basic techniques, warming up fingers and looking for project members.
We already identified some questions to Nagios developers, whose answers will affect our design decisions.
- Regarding to database schema extensions (eg for user authentication), is that a possible and usefull approach (I am thinking of Tons speech at the conference about Open Source)
- What about changes to the NDO schema? We have to know if something changes? Are changes very likely especially in regard to Nagios 3?
- What about interaction with Nagios through the webinterface (eg to disable notification). Is there an API. Do we have to use the CGIs?
Any comments / help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Tobias